Twitter to use regional blockage to comply with local laws and regulations

Twitter has announced that they have updated their engine to allow selective regional blockage to comply with local laws and regulations around the world.

This means that the company can now selectively block individual tweets (and probably accounts as well) from loading for users in individual countries.

Earlier, they were forced to censor the content for all the users requiring it to be removed from their database.

With this new update, the content would remain accessible to rest of the world while it remains blocked in select countries.

This should help them counter the challenges appearing in countries like India.

Twitter said:

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.